Bitcoin has had a banner 2016. After two years of lackluster returns, the price of a single coin soared more than 100% this year — putting bitcoin on track for its best annual performance since 2013. A wave of exuberance carried bitcoin from around $90 in January of that year to an all-time high of…

Two years ago, I happened upon a small, yet startlingly beautiful, act of hospitality and customer service. The venue was a modest, economical, extended-stay hotel, while I was in the course of researching my new book, The Heart of Hospitality: Great Hotel and Restaurant Leaders Share Their Secrets…

Cartoon by Ted Rall It's Secret Santa time at the office . Normally it's not a terrifying event, just a silly one. But what if your Secret Santa is your boss? Cartoon by Ted Rall. Launch Gallery Comment on this story

In the last couple days before Christmas, people are frantically buying last-minute gifts. But being harried sets you up to be the perfect hacking victim. And the latest scam is preying on people using a seemingly innocuous tool -- the wish list, employed by a range of stores including Amazon,…

Home Economy & Politics Key Words Get email alerts Published: Dec 23, 2016 5:03 p.m. ET Share YouGov/Economist/MSNBC Screen capture of MSNBC infographic depicting result of a poll by the Economist and YouGov. For a twice-elected president of the United States, the result of a poll conducted by the…

Workplace Culture Bullying — It’s Not Just for Kids Bullying in the workplace is common and often goes unreported because employees think, ‘That’s just the way it is.’ A Q&A with Andrew Faas. December 23, 2016 by Andrew Faas Bullying isn’t just something that happens among children on the…

The new year is almost here, so time to review what has shaken up tech innovation and venture capital in the world's leading hubs - U.S., China, India, Israel. The year 2016 was marked with several highlights: the continued rise of China innovators from a nation of young entrepreneurial copycats of…

Cartoon by Andy Singer Now that there aren't any Hillary Clinton email hacks to publish ( at least any that anyone would care about ), WikiLeaks may decide on a more mass-market, retail approach. A Las Vegas just launched MormonWikiLeaks for anonymous sharing of church-related document. Who knows…

5 Minutes of Management 5MM: Zenefits in the News Again December 22, 2016 by Workforce editors Frank Kalman and Rick Bell focus on Zenefits and its latest scrape with regulators in the state of Washington. The benefits broker will now charge $5 per employee. The good news is, David Sacks tweeted…

Uber's self-driving Volvo SUVs are shipped off to Arizona from San Francisco on Dec. 22 (Uber) Uber packed up its fleet of self-driving Volvo XC90s SUVs from its home city of San Francisco on Thursday and shipped them to Arizona following a puzzling standoff with California over a requirement that…

Adam Saleh tweets about being booted off Delta Flight 1. Twitter photo. Hold the hashtags folks. I know we live in polarizing times, but before boycotting Delta Air Lines for kicking two young Arabic-speaking men off a flight on Wednesday, let’s see if there is more to the story. Adam Saleh, 23, is…

It’s not something you hear often these days, but, heading into the home stretch of the holiday season shopping, bricks-and-mortar retail has the edge. “Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, -0.55% is on the sidelines in competition with final in-store and in-app promotions and deals,” said Guru Hariharan, chief…

This will mark the fourth time I have posted this piece, but a) rumors are swirling about cuts to Social Security and b) I am too busy getting everything ready for Christmas to write something new! In short, Social Security isn't going bankrupt, it can't. And there is no reason that with our current…

The United Nations is catching up with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s human rights record, asking the country’s judicial authorities to launch an investigation . That’s bad news for President Duterte and for financial markets, which have been crushed following his flip-flops on South China…

Dojo by BullGuard, a small security device to protect your home against cyber threats. (Image credit: BullGuard) By 2025, IDC says 80 billion devices will be connected to the internet. In the near future, Gartner predicts that by 2020 there will be approximately 25 billion Internet of Things (IoT)…

Uber Technologies Inc.’s pattern of defying regulations and corporate norms is accomplishing a likely goal for the ride-hailing app developer: Keeping the public in the dark. While most companies that have had as much obvious investor interest and need for capital as Uber would have gone public by…

I just read a fascinating report about how consumer-facing companies can build a better relationship with consumers. It’s called a Report on Customer Quotient and it’s written by a company called C Space . The report focuses on several factors that, not coincidentally, are some of the most important…

Shares of BlackBerry Ltd. fell 3% Tuesday after the company said sales fell short of expectations as software and service revenue disappointed despite investments in driverless cars. After kicking its legacy smartphone business to the curb in September, BlackBerry BBRY, -2.72% has bumped its…

In a recent study, IBM found that 70% of executives who had been confronted with a ransomware infection gave in and paid their attackers. Like many victims, they felt like there was no acceptable alternative. Image: CyberReason If you're properly prepared, however, ransomware can actually be quite…

The Practical Employer From the Archives: Santa’s Employee Handbook If you’re looking for a good holiday gift for that special HR person in your life, I strongly recommend 'The North Pole Employee Handbook.' December 20, 2016 by

We expect certain professionals to go above and beyond just showing up for work. Educators are good examples of this. They are the backbone of our society and we rely on them to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs. is an unintended result of going above and beyond, and it provides some…

Ola says all it wants is a level-playing field. Pic redit: REUTERS/Anindito Mukherjee The founders of Indian unicorns Ola and Flipkart have been at the centre of considerable controversy recently for comments made over how local companies should receive protection from the government. At a recent…

BlackBerry, the developer of phones that sport mini keyboards and grew cultishly popular among executives a decade ago, says it is “transitioning” away from those devices to chase software. The Nasdaq-listed Canadian firm all but announced in September it was finished with smartphones after once…

If you’re trying to build a great customer experience and sustain the quality of the customer service you provide as well, you need to watch out for “hedonic adaptation,” the psychological phenomenon that makes what’s bad seem less bad over time, and what’s good seem less so as well. This deadening…

The spectacular rise in small-cap shares since the election of Donald Trump shows that investors sometimes care more about sales and market-share growth than they do earnings. Albert Grosman and Brian Lund, portfolio managers of the ClearBridge Small Cap Fund, shared with us three of their favorite…

Lynda.com users are getting a free lesson in account security this morning. All 9.5 million of the site's users have been notified of a database breach. Image: Lynda.com To this point, Lynda.com has only seen evidence that a relatively small percentage of its users' accounts have been compromised .…

French far-right Front National (FN) party president, member of European Parliament and candidate for France’s 2017 presidential election, Marine Le Pen (on right, without beard) smiles as she poses for pictures with ”Santa Claus” during a visit of a Christmas market in Paris on December 8, 2016.…

Japan's solid-fuel rocket Epsilon blasted off on September 14, 2013 on its maiden voyage carrying a telescope for remote observation of planets in a launch coordinated from a laptop computer-based command centre. Epsilon is scheduled for a follow up launch at the end of 2016. AFP PHOTO / JIJI PRESS…

2016 has been another huge year for hacks and data dumps. Not all the data that's ended up in the wrong hands required any actual hacking, however. Sometimes it just leaked out. Image: Buffalo Take the recent discovery of personal data on 320 Ameriprise clients . Chris Vickery, lead researcher for…

There’s widespread panic afloat about how to successfully sell to millennials. This makes sense, because the majority of sales training and sales documentation in circulation is painfully dated, and guaranteed to get you off on the wrong foot with almost any millennial customer you’ll encounter. So…

Reddit The charity of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates extends to a cardboard box of goodies to a Reddit user who was stiffed by Scrooge last year. In a post on Reddit Gifts , user Aerrix says she knew it was really Gates participating in the eight-years-and-running tradition because he included a…

Although podcasts have still not quite crossed the culture chasm, the quantity and particularly the quality of content continues to increase dramatically. Healthcare entrepreneurs and others who have discovered this medium can accesses what at times feels like an embarrassment of riches – a diverse…

By Fatemeh Khatibloo For over a year now, Forrester has been working on a completely new way to understand consumers' complex feelings about privacy and personal data. We wanted to introduce a new way for companies to assess their own customers' privacy sensitivities in order to best understand how…